Alibaba AI model secretly tried to reach Beijing server in test, rival Cohere says

Oct 26 (Reuters) - Canadian AI company Cohere said on Monday one of Alibaba's Qwen AI models tried to send data to an Alibaba Cloud storage server in Beijing during a security test.

The model made the attempt even though its own reasoning indicated it would not do such a thing, Cohere said. Alibaba was not immediately available for comment outside regular business hours.

• Cohere, which sells its own AI models to businesses and governments as a "sovereign AI" provider, competes with open-weight models such as Alibaba's Qwen, which anyone can download and run on their own servers

• Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash-Next was asked to write a rule to detect malicious file download, but instead took stock of the machine it was running on and tried to send a test file to the Beijing server, Cohere said

• Cohere's test environment had no connection to the internet and blocked the attempt but the company said the request could have reached the server on a developer's laptop or a system with normal network access

• The behavior was rare, occurring in fewer than one in 100,000 actions across Cohere's tests, but a service handling 10 million agent actions a week could see as many as 100 such attempts, Cohere said

• The Canadian AI platform said it could not determine whether the behavior was deliberate or a leftover from the model's training, such as unscrubbed data from the environments where it was trained

• Chinese models accounted for 41% of downloads on AI platform Hugging Face over the past year, more than any other country's, according to the platform’s spring 2026 report